Bay Theatre’s Bad Dates

Bad Dates is a good night out

By Jim Reiter

Janet Luby presents a one-woman show with many personalities in Bad Dates. <<photo by Stan Barouh>>

In theater terms, when an actor talks directly to the audience, it’s known as breaking the fourth wall. When Janet Luby does it in Bay Theatre Company’s latest, she’s not so much breaking a wall as she is opening a door. Through that door we join her as she shares her life, her attempts at love and a lot of laughs.
Bad Dates is a one-woman show written by playwright, screenwriter and novelist Theresa Rebeck about Haley Walker, a 40-something single mom and restaurant manager in New York who is jumping back into the dating pool. Her first love, besides her unseen 13-year-old daughter Vera, seems to be shoes, as the four closets filled with them in the nicely rendered set attest. Keeping up a constant chatter as she models several pairs and several outfits, Luby engages us stream-of-consciousness about Haley’s failed marriage, her job, her daughter, her shoes and her frustrating, funny and sometimes heartbreaking dates.
Luby has a knack for this type of theater, having been so effective a couple of years ago in Becky’s New Car as the bored and tempted wife who seeks understanding from the audience. Her charm, timing and physicality keep things moving through the 90-minute performance (plus a 15-minute intermission), even rising above the script’s brief but uncharacteristic dip into the maudlin after a particularly promising beau proves a no-show. Luby is such a strong actress that we also get evocative and quite funny caricatures of the other people who inhabit her life, from the gay law professor to the bug guy to the Romanian Mafioso who owns her restaurant. A one-woman show, yes, with so many personalities.
As director Richard Pilcher puts it in his program notes, Bad Dates is not a chick play. It’s funny, it rings true and it certainly comes from a woman’s point of view. But in Luby’s capable hands, it’s a story that both sexes will enjoy. If my car is any indication, it will also generate quite the drive-home conversation.